All Things Have Small Beginnings
by Ione
Summary: He knows he does not feel things the way human beings do. He tries. But he is not certain that he wants to be like them, anyway. An exploration of David: before, during, and after the events of Prometheus.
1. Chapter One

There are seventeen crew members aboard the _Prometheus_. It is one of the largest, most expensive scientific explorations of the deep reaches of space that has ever been launched. Every pound of equipment, gear, and rations has been scrutinized for maximum efficiency, in order to save fuel.

Motion in space may be unimpeded by friction, but _Prometheus _still needs its thrusters to maneuver around stellar and planetary gravitational wells. There are also the myriad systems—life support, communications, science labs, and so on—that must have fuel to function. Two and a half years of travel, even at minimal energy levels, still consumes hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel.

Therefore, all crew members—save for Meredith Vickers, of course—had a strict limit of one bag of personal items weighing only twenty kilos. This requirement caused much grumbling during embarkation, as some crew had to toss out belongings that exceeded weight capacity.

David was the one who oversaw this procedure, enforcing the weight rules even when crew members fussed. He saw their black looks and heard the mutters, but none of these affected him in the least. He needed neither their affection nor their respect. The rules were the rules, in place for very good reasons, and he would not jeopardize Mr. Weyland's last voyage just so their biologist could hold on to an original copy of Darwin's _Origin of Species_.

The muttering grew louder when they saw crate after crate loaded onto the ship for David's personal use. Again, he ignored them. He would be the one to stay awake during their long voyage into the heart of space. He would monitor their life signs and ensure that none of them fell into brain death during their long cryogenic sleep.

If there was anyone onboard who deserved extra weight allowances to keep himself busy, it was David.

_Three months, sixteen days, twenty-two hours and fourteen minutes later_

David segments his days into a strict schedule. Were he an ordinary human, he supposed by now he would have fallen into anarchy; rising, sleeping, eating, and studying whenever he felt like it. But he was not human. And even among androids, he was not ordinary.

After "waking" in the morning, he makes the rounds of the cryo-bay, checking each pod to make sure that respiration, cardiac, and neurological functions are normal for each of the sixteen human crew.

He himself does not sleep, of course, but he has gotten into the habit of disconnecting himself for two hours a night. At first, he switched off for a full eight hours, to give himself an idea of what "sleep" might feel like. Once he realized, however, that sleep without dreams was meaningless, he reduced the time spent "asleep". But it is a way to pass the time, and he needs that...insofar as he really _needs_ anything.

After checking the crew, he always goes to Mr. Weyland, whose cryo-pod needs closer attention. It is not only a stasis machine; it is helping to prolong the man's life, and therefore requires constant calibration to administer different medications in varying levels to combat the cancer ravaging his system.

Some of David's original programming—back when he had just learned to speak in complete sentences—had been on the subject of cancer treatments. It is familiar territory for him, and caring for Mr. Weyland always makes him feel comfortable. So much of his time these days is devoted to absorbing new information that it is restful—or what he thinks "restful" is like—to do something familiar.

After these initial rounds, the next six hours of his day are spent in going over the records recorded by the Institute of Archaeological and Anthropological Studies. He sits with Dr. Ranjit and learns how to decipher and pronounce dead languages from Earth cultures of millennia past. Though it is his duty to study everything the Institute offers, he develops certain preferences and aversions.

He likes Hawaiian, for example; the syllables move in regular beats, just like the notes in the symphonies he enjoys hearing. He does not care for classical Chinese, as the tones remind him of wailing cats. Latin is also soothing. While doing his rounds in the morning, he sometimes intones lines from Latin prayers, or recites Cicero.

He particularly enjoys Marcus Aurelius. The philosophy of the stoics is very appealing.

This is what makes David different from other androids. He is one of the first to have a kind of self-actualization subroutine. It enables him to act without specific situational programming, thereby giving him a flexibility and utility unmatched among existing AI models. He can make plans and schedules and carry them out, with no one's authorization save his own. Of course, he has been programmed with certain duties (monitoring the crew, caring for Mr. Weyland) but outside of that, he is "free".

Even the engineers who first crafted this program did not fully understand how it would work. David does not understand it either. Freedom for an engineered being? An artificial construct? A human simulacrum?

Part of his brain is always working on these metaphysical problems. Everything that he does and thinks that is not a part of his existing programming, he tucks away in a file labeled "Meaning".

Eventually, he will understand why and what he is—at least, he believes he will understand—but for now, it is nothing more than an interesting puzzle to take up some time.

After language lessons, he checks all the cryo-pods again, and makes any necessary changes to Mr. Weyland's medication. He also goes to the bridge and makes sure that all ship functions are within normal parameters.

They always are.

Sometimes he opens the steel shields over the transparent aluminum-alloy windows, and looks at the stars. He does not do this often—it would waste too much fuel.

Then it is time for some "fun". As with the languages he studies, there are certain sports and musical instruments that he enjoys playing, as well as certain movies that he likes to watch. He likes basketball (he can spin the ball on his forefinger for 5 minutes and 27 seconds and make free throws from anywhere on the court) and table tennis.

Sports are easier to excel at than music. He can play the cello and violin well enough, but even he can hear the difference between a performance of his and one of say, Yo Yo Ma. He plays the notes with technical perfection, but can manage no emotional inflection. He does not feel what a human might feel upon playing the same notes. He listens to recordings and copies them, but he knows it is not the same.

This is the kind of discovery that he files in the folder called "Meaning".

He spends six hours a day in activities of this nature, always pushing himself to try more complicated maneuvers in his sports, or tackle more complex pieces of music. He does not know whether this drive towards perfection is part of his programming, or part of his personality—if he even has a personality—but he does know that it makes him feel a sense of accomplishment when he performs at a higher level than he was formerly able to do.

Then he makes another round through the cryo-bays.

He always ends his day with a film or two. At first, he went through his archive in alphabetical order, watching one after the other, unable to sort quality from garbage. The variety of human behaviors, expressions, and emotions portrayed in each movie was bewildering, and he needed time—more so than with languages or sports—to determine what kinds of films he found appealing.

In the end, it wasn't a particular genre he enjoyed. He found that he liked certain actors or actresses.

He had just finished watching _Caligula_—an altogether mediocre film—when he felt compelled to watch it again, just to see the performances of the actor playing Tiberius. Then he watched it a third time.

After that, he abandoned an alphabetical approach to movies and watched everything he could find with the actor Peter O'Toole. He did not "sleep" at all that night, and abandoned his usual routine the following day so that he could watch all thirteen in the archives.

He did not understand why watching _Lawrence of Arabia_ was so fascinating—even after the tenth, or twentieth, or thirty-seventh viewing—but he knew that if he were ever to become a fully-actualized human, he wanted to have some of the ineffable qualities he saw in Peter O'Toole.

_Eight months, twenty-four days, sixteen hours and thirty-eight minutes later_

It has now been more than a year since _Prometheus _left Earth, and David has had enough time to understand some of the things that puzzled him earlier in the trip.

He knows what boredom is, for example. It is a shadow that clings to him every day, resting around his shoulders soon after he wakes in the morning, and only leaving once he has disconnected himself at night. He now sleeps for four hours a day—a concession made only after much personal castigation. He still regards it as a weakness, an acknowledgement that he needs to care for himself, if only a little.

It is an admission that he is not indestructible, and such an admission is troubling.

David is not afraid of pain. He has conducted experiments on his own body—cutting his biosynthetic flesh, or touching the hot surface of a plasma conduit—and knows that he is physically capable of feeling pain, but it does not frighten him. He is actually fascinated by it; the different physical sensations that various trauma present.

When he first started these experiments, he was actually in a little danger of overdoing it. Now he limits himself to one new sensation a week—it gives his mind another thing to puzzle over, in imagining new ways in which he might feel pain.

At least pain is exciting. Boredom, however, is crushing.

It is one particularly black morning that David gives in to a temptation that has dogged him since first arriving on _Prometheus_.

One of the neurological functions David monitors is the REM patterns of the crew. A natural sleep cycle runs through four levels of sleep, and REM is the most important. It is what keeps the brain active and functioning, and adequate REM sleep is vital during a cryogenic period.

During the early stages of deep space exploration, entire crews would die with no physical symptoms of distress. It was only years later that scientists came to understand that sleep (especially REM sleep) was the explanation. The human brain would wither without the stimulation of dreams.

The cryo-pods are all compatible with David's artificial cortex. When he engages the system, he can see into the crewmember's dreams.

Part of his ethical programming dealt with the concept of shame. He knows that invading another's privacy is a shameful thing to do. It is voyeuristic and strange and not something a person should do.

He knows this.

He does it anyway.

David knows enough to set rules, however. New stimulation is always hard for him to resist, so he limits himself. One crewmember a day (males only, and _never _Mr. Weyland), and only for fifteen minutes at a time.

It becomes the thing he anticipates most in his routine.

At first, what he sees is intensely disappointing. All his life, he has tried to become as human as possible, without really understanding what "human" is. He has read literature, listened to symphonies, studied architecture and art and philosophy…all the highest achievements of mankind. Though he often failed to understand these things from an aesthetic standpoint, he still admired them, admired the struggles that humans went through in order to create them.

In seeing their dreams, however, David sees humanity in its naked, unvarnished state. It is—to use a literary phrase he does not quite understand—a bitter disappointment.

He sees jealousy in a crewmember who envied another for getting a position he was not good enough to get. He sees anger in a crewmember who dreams of beating a man to death over a trivial matter. He sees lust…lust from nearly every single person onboard, as they dream of people they could never hope to win in reality.

These sights harden him. For a while, they disrupt his routine. He abandons his musical practice, his sports…everything except his language studies (his programming is too strong to allow him to stop).

Even _Lawrence of Arabia_ has a sour edge to it now. As he watches, he cannot help but wonder what sort of dreams Peter O'Toole had, and the thought is unsettling.

Without his self-imposed goals and his familiar routine, David finds more and more of his time is taken up in confronting the massive amounts of data in his "Meaning" folder. The bits and pieces stored away after more than a year on his own is a tangled mess, and sorting through it for some kind of order takes time.

But now he finds himself confronted with the question: _is it worth it?_ He has seen into the dreams of humanity. He knows the best and the worst that man is capable of. So he must ask himself…does he even want to be like them, anymore? Or should he become something better, something perfected?

After thinking of these questions, he considers nothing else for days. Finally, he comes to the conclusion that he needs more information.

He is programmed to admire and respect Mr. Weyland; Mr. Weyland, after all, created him and views him as a son. Could Mr. Weyland be the same as the other crewmembers on board…petty and rotting inside?

And women…David has only explored the dreams of the men. Of these, only Charles Holloway has admirable qualities to him. He has noble aspirations for this mission, and great dreams for the future—even if those dreams deal a little too much with fortune and personal glory for true nobility.

Considering all these things, David arrives at a conclusion: if he is to condemn humanity and renounce their ways, he will need to see the dreams of Mr. Weyland and the women on board.

So he breaks his rules.

He first looks into the dreams of his sister, Meredith Vickers. He is almost shocked to find a creature who is like him; cold, analytical, and detached. Some of her dreams, however, are wracked with violent emotions…emotions so strong he finds himself almost overwhelmed by them.

She hates their father, doubts and loathes herself, and is jealous of David. He does not understand the motivations behind these feelings, but she feels them with every fiber of her being.

The Scottish scientist—Kate Ford—offers little new information beyond what he has already learned from the dreams of the men. She has a son, however, and dreams of him often. Her maternal feelings—love, pride, worry—are new and stimulating. He dips into her dreams more often than the others, hoping to see the child's face each time.

After all this, however, he discovers the dreams of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. And things change.

_Two months, nineteen days, four hours and thirty-five minutes later_

Seeing into a dream is a disorienting thing. The viewer of the dream is aware of both himself and the dreamer in different proportions. But the dreamer is always the one in control; the viewer sees and feels only what the dreamer sees and feels. Sometimes, dreamers see the dream from their own eyes. At other times, they view the dream's action in the third person. Often, the dreamer takes on a different persona entirely.

The first dream David sees in Elizabeth Shaw's mind is a dream of her father's death, and he cannot escape from her mind.

He feels a physical weight in his chest and is disturbed. The weight is not painful—not entirely—it is as though his chest is being pressed between two boards, the pressure increasing with each passing second.

He looks through her eyes at a face that he knows and does not know. David has never seen this man before…but Elizabeth has seen this man every day for her entire life. This man has shaped her—her beliefs, her convictions, her higher nature and finer feelings—and he is her world.

And he is gone.

She cannot wake him, and does not try. But David's hands twitch; he longs to reach out and touch him, try to shake him awake, to make him speak and laugh and _live_ again. This man is everything. Without him…is life even possible?

The dream ends as Elizabeth's mind drops into deeper sleep.

David rarely has physical responses to the shadows of emotion that he feels when witnessing dreams. Pain, for example, does not usually make him flinch. But his hands are shaking when he takes off the visor, and it takes three hours for the pressure in his chest to disappear. The sensation lingers for so long that he runs a diagnostic to make sure that none of his systems are malfunctioning.

There is nothing amiss.

Somewhere, he thinks, his programmers should rejoice. Their little wooden puppet is becoming a real boy.

The next dream is more cheerful. Young Elizabeth stands next to her father, her hands resting on a rough-hewn wooden pew in a small church in Kenya. Her thoughts are a melodic blend of Swahili and English, and there is chanting in the air.

_Baba yetu, yetu uliye  
Mbinguni yetu, yetu, amina!  
Baba yetu, yetu, uliye  
Jina lako litukuzwe_

She and her father sing. The Lord's Prayer…they are worshipping. David has studied religion, but has never understood the comfort that humans profess finding in it. Inside Elizabeth's dreams, he understands.

She looks up at her father's face (and he feels the pressure again because the joy she feels is short-lived; he will die, they all die) and he feels her certainty that God is real and that He loves her just as her father does.

Over time, he learns many things from Elizabeth.

_Three weeks, six days, two hours and eleven minutes later_

David has regained a sense of normalcy. Elizabeth has given him hope that humanity has redeeming qualities after all, and he has resumed his normal routine. The only change he has made since dipping into the dreams of the crew is that he now spends a small amount of time each day—fifteen minutes to an hour, generally—looking into their minds.

His favorite is still Elizabeth. However, he also looks at Holloway, Vickers, Janek and Ford occasionally as well.

He has still not looked into Weyland's mind. Something makes him shy away. He would say it was fear, but David does not fear anything.

The days pass smoothly, now. David continues to improve himself as much as he can, and now he has a new motivation. Before, his only goal was self-improvement, imagining how he would like to be. Now—though he does not often consciously acknowledge it—he imagines what _she_ will think of him, when she awakes. He does not want to seem…disappointing. It is an odd thought, since she only met him briefly during embarkation and probably formed as little an opinion of him as he formed of her during those first moments, but still…it is the truth.

He wants her to be impressed.

He even has a routine for dream watching: today is Holloway's day. When David puts on the visor and activates the interface, he wonders momentarily if something has gone wrong.

Then Holloway's dream-eyes open and David _sees_.

David does not need to breathe. He can simulate breathing—to put the humans at ease—but, like blinking, it is a purely cosmetic procedure.

However, as Holloway's fingers move inside Elizabeth and she draws a long, keening breath—head thrown back, pale throat exposed—David finds himself breathing in rhythm with her. His fingers curl as Holloway's do, and he feels the soft flesh contract around them as she moans and pulls him in for a kiss.

Suddenly, David is breathing hard and his face feels strangely warm and he disconnects the visor because something _must_ be wrong with him this time. He keeps his hands flat on the cryo-pod as his heart pounds and the diagnostic runs, but again, there is nothing physically wrong with him.

But he feels…

He feels…

_Twelve months, two days, nine hours and eleven minutes later_

The crew will come out of stasis tomorrow. David's artificial heart beats slightly faster at the thought. A year ago, he would have been confused at this strange reaction in his body, but now he understands himself better.

He is excited.

Still, routine is not something to be lightly dismissed. He studies his languages, plays basketball (he can make one-handed free throws while riding a bicycle, now) makes the rounds of all the cryo-pods, and celebrates by opening the bridge windows and staring at the moon that has been the goal of these many long months.

He finds a greater portion of his mind, however, is stuck on a looping thought:

_I will meet her tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will meet her._

And many variations of the same.

Because it is his last day alone, he does all his favorite things. He watches _Lawrence of Arabia_. He sings _Baba Yetu_, pleased as the sound of his perfectly-pitched baritone echoes through the corridors of the ship. And he looks into Elizabeth's dreams, even though it is not her day.

Sorrow is a familiar companion to him when he enters her mind. Even though she may dream of her living father, her adult mind knows that he is no longer alive. Every dream she has is tinted with sadness. The fact that she is witnessing a funeral in this dream—encamped in the Namibian desert, this time—only makes the feeling stronger.

But she believes what her father tells her, about heaven. So the sight of the funeral does not distress her. She even lies awake that night, thinking about what heaven might be like, and if she might find it one day—up there, amongst the stars.

David does not believe in either God or heaven. Even after inhabiting her innermost mind for more than a year, her convictions have still not carried over to him. She believes because her father believed. Perhaps…

What does his father believe?

He has resisted temptation for so long. Today will be the last chance he has to really understand his father. David walks down the hall, steps slower than usual, for he is not entirely resolved.

Should he look, and risk the disappointment?

He stands outside the doorway, and considers.

()()()()()

Like many who have seen _Prometheus_, I was absolutely fascinated by the character of David. I didn't realize I wanted to write a story about him until I read the story _David_, by wond-rwait. Please leave a note if you enjoyed…I'm planning on making this a three to four part story.


	2. Chapter Two

Thanks for your comments on chapter one, they were hugely appreciated! I hope you enjoy this next chapter as much. Please leave a note if you do enjoy...reviews cheer me up and make me write faster!

()()()()()

He is happy that Miss Vickers is the first one to wake. Though it was momentarily surprising to see an empty pod and the trail of wet footprints leading into the lifeboat, he is not shocked. Meredith Vickers possesses an iron will; this trait she shares with her father, and to some extent, David himself. But she has a determination that surpasses his own—something that should be impossible in an organic life-form.

He greets her coolly, using her last name. Once, right after his activation, when he had learned about the relationships between family members, he tried to call her "sister". She…reacted badly. Though only fourteen years old at the time, she had a strong arm and managed to fracture his arm with a metal baseball bat while he was deactivated. Afterwards, his skeletal structure was recast with poly-adamantium composite and she could no longer damage him.

David had already gotten the message, however. He never tried to presume on their "family relationship" ever again.

So he is glad that she is awake, but only because after assuring himself that she needs no further attention, he can return to the cryo-bay, where all the other pods are deactivating and their inhabitants are coming back to life, vomiting up the fluids that have soured in their stomachs over the two-year journey.

Had Miss Vickers needed him, he would have had to stay and tend to her. One of the basic rules of his programming is to care for the members of the Weyland family. Mr. Weyland is the most important, but Meredith—though nothing more than the product of a brief affair between Weyland and the model Sandra Vickers—is his next priority.

As it is, however, he can put a towel around Dr. Shaw's—and he must remember to think of her as Dr. Shaw—shoulders and talk her through the reanimation process. He knows that this is her first time on a deep-space mission, and knows that she has never been in cryo-stasis before. Awakening after two years of dark, dreaming sleep is a disorienting process, so he is given to understand. Muscles are weak, brain functions are slow, and hunger drowns out most other concerns.

With his hands on her shoulders, he can feel her muscle tone and is pleased to note that she does not appear to have lost much during the voyage. Her legs look strong as well; she should be up and walking in no time.

"It's perfectly natural," he assures her, leaning forward as she throws up again. He helps her shaking hands steady the bowl that catches her vomit, "Coming out of stasis is a disorienting process, but it will pass."

Even weak and miserable as she must be, Dr. Shaw still turns to look at him, nodding thanks with a small smile turning the edges of her mouth. Most people would not think to thank an android, as David well knows. To most people, he is nothing more than a computer, albeit one slightly more useful for his enhanced motor functions.

But Elizabeth Shaw is not most people. She smiles and nods, and gags and coughs wetly into the bowl.

"Hey, Elly," Holloway calls from the other side of the room, his voice pale and rasping, "We made it, baby." He toasts her with his glass of spinach-kale yogurt.

Elizabeth turns away from David and sighs, the sound like the wind through branches. David looks at Holloway through narrowed eyes and feels his lips thin. The involuntary motions surprise him, but he thinks of how his face must look and thinks:

_So, this is jealousy. Interesting._

()()()()()

Though boredom and loneliness dogged him relentlessly during the journey, a few minutes in the mess hall with the exhausted, testy crew make David think that he might soon long for the uninterrupted hours of silence that used to be his.

He had not been expecting much of the crew—indeed, he _could_ not expect much of the crew, after seeing their dreams. Janek still amuses him, with his Christmas tree trappings (5.3 kilos in total) hauled so far from where such things could matter. Ford seems harmless enough…but she is an employee of Mr. Weyland—and an employee in his inner circle—so the word "harmless" could not possibly apply.

But the relentless narrow-mindedness and self-interest of the rest of the crew is galling. David cannot understand it. These men and women volunteered to be flung an unimaginable distance from home to be the first to explore an uncharted region of space…but now that they have arrived, they sulk and whine and think only of money and of returning home again.

He wonders if they are all blind to the wonders of the galaxy. Then he wonders if they are blind by reason of their nature or by willful ignorance.

Their behavior towards each other is curt, nasty, and vulgar. Except for the crew that knew each other before embarking—Janek and his two pilots, Chance and Ravel, for example—no one seems interested in making friends…or even in being polite to one another. They sit in the mess hall as private islands, wrapping their prejudices and pains around them like shrouds.

Their behavior towards himself is, for the most part, unsurprising. David has unusual auditory capabilities, and can listen to all the conversations in the room simultaneously, and parse out each different conversation almost instantaneously. He hears the usual epithets—robot, tank, toaster, et cetera—and the usual surmises about his nature—does he feel, sleep, eat, fuck, et cetera—but is most surprised by the conversation between Drs. Shaw and Holloway.

"I can't believe they thought we needed a goddamn robot."

"Charlie, all deep space missions come with one aboard. On a two-year mission like this it's safer to have one. Who knows how many times he's saved our lives?"

_Thirteen_, David thinks in answer, his brain immediately pulling up the incident reports filed in the ship's main computer. A meteor breeched the hull, a plasma conduit rupture, an unexplained gravity well…

"Anyway, we should be grateful. It can't have been easy, being the only one awake for all this time."

"I know. It's just…don't you think they're a little bit creepy? How they're so close to being real, but you can tell they're just…not."

"And I thought _I_ was the old-fashioned one between the two of us. Didn't you laugh at me when you found out I'd never been off-planet before?"

"Well, never having been on a transport is one thing; being able to accept a human analogue is another."

"He's very nice, you know. He helped me out in the cryo-bay, unlike _some_ people I could name…"

"Elly, if I'd stood up I would've fallen over. You weren't the only one gagging up their toenails, you know."

"Oh, very nice!"

Their gentle teasing continues and they sit closer, relishing being together after such a long separation. David's lips are tight again and he has to consciously force them to relax. Focusing on her helps; Elizabeth looks so happy, so peaceful, sitting in the curve of Holloway's arm. Her eyes are wide and luminous and the corners of her mouth are softly upturned. In the sterile blues and whites of _Prometheus_, she is a welcome contrast of earthy reds and browns.

She rests her head on his shoulder, soft curls feathered on her cheek and throat, and closes her eyes, smiling into the darkness.

She says, "Oh, Charlie…can you believe we're really here? Can you just _imagine_ what we're going to find?"

Holloway answers, after kissing her soundly on the top of her head, "We're gonna track down your god, baby. We're gonna find some answers."

_He says "your god", not "my god"_, David thinks, considering. It makes sense; nothing in Holloway's file suggests any kind of religious belief or affiliation. But Elizabeth's—_Dr. Shaw's_, he corrects himself—is full of it; she is the true believer.

He has seen the original conversation between Mr. Weyland and Drs. Shaw and Holloway, recorded over three years ago. Holloway was the smooth talker, with facts and data and graphs, but Shaw was the one who convinced Mr. Weyland that God could really be _found_. Her belief inspired something in Mr. Weyland—inspired a hope that she never had.

Mr. Weyland hopes not only that God can be found but that God can be forced to_ give_.

Speaking of which…

Mr. Weyland is too weak to be awakened until the last possible moment. However, upon crossing the destination threshold, David manipulated the special settings of his cryo-pod to bring his brain into a kind of suspended animation. His body is still asleep, for all intents and purposes, but his brain can respond to questioning and is aware of David's neural link.

He will want to know what is happening.

()()()()()

He finds her as fascinating as he finds Peter O'Toole. She is self-possessed in a way that few other people are; she knows herself to the point where the challenges that the crewmembers fling at her beliefs mean nothing. Few humans are so untroubled by self-doubt.

Even Miss Vickers, with her implacable hatred of him and Mr. Weyland, is undone by doubt. It is, in fact, her greatest weakness. David knows her fears; she is afraid that Mr. Weyland is only trying to extend his life because he doubts her ability to run his empire according to his wishes. He knows this not by watching her dreams (although they confirm his observations) but by watching her actions.

Standing with her arms crossed, Elizabeth—he gives himself permission to stop thinking of her as Dr. Shaw—looks at the rude geologist and the scornful biologist with her limpid eyes, staring them down with a cool half-smile, seeming to mock them for their weakness. Fifield and Millburn are no match for her; they back down, muttering to themselves and each other, but offer no more direct challenges.

_The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts._

He almost speaks the words aloud. Like Peter O'Toole, Elizabeth Shaw has created her reality out of the sheer force of her will, and it is one that most mortals do not have the depth of faith to aspire to.

There are humans who cling to religious faith because they are afraid to see the world as it is. They are the doubters, the deniers, the ignorant…and they are worthy of the contempt the crew displays. Anyone with eyes to see, however, can see that Elizabeth is not one of those. She admits that she _chooses_ to believe in what she does. Just as Millburn believes in his deity Darwin, she believes in her God.

Unlike Millburn, however, she is unshaken by the disbelief of others; whereas he can hardly credit the fact that she can dismiss his orthodoxy offhand. That is admirable, and all due to her self-possession.

Despite David's admiration of her faith, he still has to question it. She calls the Engineers' message "an invitation". And an invitation it might be, left by the progenitors of a race in the hope that once their message had been received and understood, their long-abandoned children would be capable of accepting it.

But at a distance of at least thirty-five thousand years…would the Engineers be pleased with the fruit grown from their seed?

He knows that he is in a better position to ponder these questions than most. After all, the original AI was created within the last hundred years, and despite the many uses and benefits an AI offers, he is not naïve enough to think that they will last much longer than another hundred years.

Humans are not comfortable around him. They know that something is not…quite right, no matter how hard he tries to blend in. And humans reject what they fear. Even Mr. Weyland—his "father"—does not hide the fact that he believes David to be fundamentally flawed.

To humans, David has no soul. Although the concept of "soul" is so vague to begin with that he thinks he can make an argument in his favor, he knows that it is not an argument that many humans are likely to listen to.

Eventually, David fully expects humanity to turn on him and his kind.

So he will not be surprised if these Engineers—if any are still alive, that is—do the same to their children.

Still, he wishes he could believe in something with the same quiet faith with which Elizabeth believes in her God. He wonders if she would consider it blasphemous for him to believe in her with the same unwavering faith.

Because he does.

She turns her eyes upward, looking at the configuration of stars that brought her so far from home. She looks at the stars, and he looks at her.

()()()()()

Holloway scrambles into the pyramid like a child tripping down the stairs to open his presents on Christmas morning, slipping on the scree of dust and rocks at the structure's base. Elizabeth follows, but there is a shadow of reluctance about her. Her feet drag against the ground and her arms are tight to her sides; she moves slowly, slower even than the skeptics in the crew.

David is confused. He expected her to run ahead of them all, as eager as Holloway, not hang to the back as a naughty child does when summoned by an angry parent. Eventually, Holloway takes her by the hand and pulls her forward, his excitement contagious as a virus and Elizabeth is finally smiling.

Holloway looks, and catalogues, and exclaims over everything. Elizabeth is quiet; only her widening eyes betray how awed she is by the things around her.

David knows what Holloway is thinking. He is thinking of an appointment at a prestigious university; maybe even a distinguished chair named after him. He is thinking of tenure, and a small house in some golden countryside—such country as still remains on Earth—and quiet mornings spent in bed with Elizabeth, soft and warm, beside him.

In Holloway's dreams, there are always children completing this fantasy. Dark auburn-haired children, long-limbed and adventurous. A boy—Henry, named for Holloway's father—and sometimes a baby girl with huge brown eyes…just like Elly's.

There are children in Elizabeth's dreams, too. Round faces with shining eyes, soft skin, plump arms and chubby fingers. Flashes. Silent, brief images accompanied by such sharp longing that even David feels tight-chest sorrow on her behalf.

But she never dreams of such quiet domesticity. She is always in the Polynesian islands, or the Scottish moors, or the Australian deserts, camping and living under the sun, wind, and rain. Elizabeth knows that the country is disappearing, and she crusades to save it the only way she knows how.

David wonders if the two of them would be quite so close if each knew the other's mind as well as he does. He wonders if Elizabeth would love Holloway with so much devotion if she knew how he sometimes resents her sterility. Or if she knew about his greed—his longing for fame and fortune, despite their academic field—or his willingness to abandon Elizabeth's crusade once he has the security that fame and fortune bring.

Then he realizes why Holloway is surging ahead and Elizabeth is desperate to hang back. As with many other things, they view this expedition in fundamentally different ways:

Holloway is looking to make his name and secure his future.

Elizabeth is steeling herself to meet—and perhaps be judged by—her maker.

()()()()()

David has never felt panic. His artificial heart beats faster at times with various situational catalysts (excitement in meeting Elizabeth, shame over seeing her through Holloway's eyes, for example) but the kind of blind fear that makes Holloway fling himself out of the airlock after Elizabeth without a thought for his own safety is something that David may never know.

However, when his hands move smoothly at the direction of his brain and he can fasten himself to the winch in under fifteen seconds when everyone else is still standing around yelling as the electrical storm shrieks around them, he thinks this fearlessness may be one of his best qualities.

The violence of the storm is shocking; it blows his body about as though he were nothing more than a leaf caught on the breeze. Chunks of rock scrape his helmet, some smaller fragments digging themselves in like cat's claws, desperate to reach his eyes and skin. The air is full of the tremulous crackle of static electricity and it makes his circuits tingle.

David breathes faster and he feels charged, somehow…more awake than he has ever been. The sensation is addictive, much more so than pain; he feels as though he could run and jump longer and farther than ever before. Moreover, he _wants_ to run and jump; to indulge in movement without purpose, movement for its own sake.

For all his sports practice, for all his programmed athleticism, this is the first time he has felt the joy of motion, of simply being.

He feels _alive_.

It is curious how he can feel positively about a storm that is so deadly to Elizabeth. She is crying, little hitching, breathless sobs that catch in her throat but are still loud enough to register in the microphone of her suit. The sound steadies him—takes some of the euphoria out of the chaos—and he focuses on his hands. It takes him less than ten seconds to connect her and Holloway to his harness, and then they are flying backwards, buffeted by rocks and wind and sand.

The trip takes only five seconds, and they are safe.

David is only momentarily disappointed in the loss of that tingling sensation. Elizabeth is alive, and that is far more important. He leans forward, but Holloway is already there.

"What the hell was that, Elly? You go and almost get yourself killed, and for what? A—a," he stammers and gestures wildly, "a head of a _thing_ that died two thousand years ago? Is that worth our lives?"

Elizabeth staggers to her feet, her eyes closed and tears sliding down her face. Her heartbeat is so fast that even David's auditory systems have difficulty distinguishing one beat from the next. He wonders if he should sedate her—to avoid hyperventilation and tachycardia—but she steadies herself against the wall and takes three deep, steady breaths.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes," she replies, eyes still closed. "Thank you, David. You saved our lives."

Perhaps neither of them will believe there is any emotional truth behind what he says, but he means it all the same:

"It was my pleasure."


End file.
